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Based on an ongoing ethnographic project, this article examines ways in which the Indian middle class, with its relatively easy access to English, represents an inner circle of power and privilege that for a variety of reasons remains inaccessible to particular groups of people in India. Specifically, the data revealed that certain institutional and teaching practices keep English out of the reach of lower income and lower caste groups and push them into outer circles. The students central to this article are Dalit (lower-caste) students and students from the so-called Other Backward Classes who have been socialized in Gujarati-medium schools in Grades K-12 and who have to contend with English at the tertiary level.Confronted by the double authority of the book itself and the English teacher endorsing and buttressing it by painful explication, they read and listen patiently in the classroom. Then they go back to the colorfully translated Hindi version of the text in the crib and memorize the "proper" answers from the same source, thus making both the text and teacher redundant; or they improvise in halting English their expressions of sympathy for Desdemona and Joe Keller and make clear their incomprehension at original sin, and contribute their own malapropisms to an account of Mrs. Malaprop's contribution to the humor of the play. (Rajan, 1986, p. 33)